Curating the Perfect Instagram feed

At Me:Mo we curate restaurant social media, and a core part of this is their Instagram presence.Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms; 1 billion people use Instagram every monthand over 5 million active on the app each day (Hootsuite), making it a very effective platform to reach the audience you want to. Business accounts use their Instagram as an extension of their brand. A restaurant’s social media feed should reflect the brand and the restaurant, giving viewers a glimpse of what they can expect before visiting.

An Instagram feed s­­hould be aligned to fit a particular theme. In the case of restaurant social media, this is predominantly food. But it’s also important to convey the atmosphere of the restaurant in your feed, including interior and people shots.

Not only this but the brand itself – whether this is through pantone shades in the photography or graphic design. Designed highlights and art-worked posts are a good opportunity to intertwine brand colours, fonts and any other brand assets.

Consistency is key. Ensure your feed flows, stick to a particular approach. There’s multiple ways to achieve this, for example: using by using similar filters, use similar tones, hues and ‘feel’ in your editing technique, using a sequence to the posts, dotting in the use of graphics or words, or the use of borders. Here are some of our favourite apps we use to build beautiful, well-curated feeds.

VSCO Cam is a mobile app that is quick, user friendly and has some unique pre-sets and filters. Applying the same subtle filter to each of your images can bring all your images together – and help the overall look and feel of the feed.

Instasize app is a quick and easy way to add borders to your images. Lots of Instagram feeds are using borders as a way of presenting your great imagery in a neater way. See below what we did for Thai restaurant in Soho, Wild Rice. The simple addition of borders creates an instantly stylish aesthetic, and attracts followers who are not only interested in the restaurant, but also their style. #DoItForTheGram

Snapseed is another great quick and easy photo editing app. The perfect app to brighten up a gloomy image and get rid of jarring orange and dark tones. With a simple click of the Auto button – your images go from 0 – 10. You can also manually edit imagery; fix skewed lines with the perspective filter, adjust the white balance, or use the curves filter to get precise control over brightness levels.